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webshit weekly

An annotated digest of the top "Hacker" "News" posts for the second week of March, 2018.

A Career Cold Start AlgorithmMarch 08, 2018(comments)
A webshit advocates learning about things by asking people who know the answers. Hackernews misconstrues the title to be about getting a job, which explodes into lengthy and bitter arguments about whether you'll get a shitty job, be too shitty for the great jobs that Hackernews has to offer, or get a shitty job working for shitty people doing shitty things. Once Hackernews is finished studiously ignoring the fact that they're all in the third category, they try to decide whether the webshit's advice is only for people who matter, or if fungible javascript-assembly-line workers are allowed to hear it too.

FCC Accuses Stealthy Startup of Launching Rogue SatellitesMarch 09, 2018(comments)
The United States Government disapproves of a startup, "Uber for Kessler Effects," which is funded in part by the United States Government. Hackernews spends six years arguing whether or not the United States Government should have a say in whether a company registered in the United States, located in the United States, and funded by the United States Government is allowed to skulk off and pay some discount space agency for a ride.

Round Peg in a Square Hole [video]March 10, 2018(comments)
A glowing man is concerned about an oversized communion wafer. At least, that's what it looks like, based on the thumbnail of this Youtube video, which I am not going to watch. After fawning over the glowing man, Hackernews trades amazement at the trick with the communion wafer and derision for the people who didn't already know the trick with the communion wafer.

Vim Clutch – A hardware pedal for improved text editing (2012)March 11, 2018(comments)
An idiot builds a really bad keyboard. Hackernews reminisces about other bad keyboards they've seen and fantasizes about bad keyboards still to come. When that winds down, the topic switches to the scads of dumb garbage they've all squirreled away in their text editor configurations. At least one Hackernews in this discussion has more commits to a "dotfiles" repository than all other programming work combined.

Slack's bait and switchMarch 12, 2018(comments)
A webshit-flavored XMPP Memorial Society member is mad about a more popular chat service. Hackernews is nakedly contemptuous of the drooling idiots who are unwilling to pay money for the privilege of spamming animated GIFs at other people on the internet. The rest of the comments are people suggesting other half-baked webshit chat trash, sucking it up and writing a check to the Slack people, or spiteful crimes against humanity from people desperate to be the next Slack-style check-cashing organization.

Theranos, CEO Holmes, and Former President Balwani Charged with FraudMarch 14, 2018(comments)
The Securities and Exchange Commission lowers the boom on some charlatans. Hackernews nitpicks the announcement, trying to ascertain exactly how much "lying to investors" needs to take place before they're next against the wall -- is it an absolute amount? How many thousands of words of bullshit will bring the feds? Is it a relative amount? Is your business being entirely bullshit-based grounds for an exemption? If other, richer bullshit artists get away with it, might it be worth trying anyway? Hackernews feverishly scrabbles at the walls of their Habitrail, desperately seeking a return to a world where lying to everyone you meet while blowing through hundreds of millions of dollars of other people's money is praised as entrepreneurship, rather than prosecuted in court.